Stage Review: Sweet 'Superior Donuts' threatens to go stale

Jamie Mann (from left), Michael Frutticher, Chris Hart and Jonathan Underwood perform in "Superior Donuts," the first of two plays by Tracy Letts to be staged by Circuit Playhouse this season. The show runs through Sept. 19.

Playhouse on the Square has more than a few things in common with Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company. For one, the same architect designed the two theaters and their spaces are similar.

They also share an affinity for Tulsa-born playwright Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of "August: Osage County," an epic three-act Broadway play that is packed with more family dysfunction than a touring gospel musical.

It debuted at Steppenwolf in 2007 and was followed up by another Letts play, "Superior Donuts," which also transferred to Broadway, albeit to less-enthusiastic reviews.

Both scripts are on Playhouse's To Do list this season, though the inferior "Superior Donuts" is the first to take a bow at Circuit.

Set in Chicago's diverse Uptown neighborhood, it is primarily about a rogue Russian accent that threatens to take over the world, starting with a small coffee and doughnut shop.

OK, not exactly.

But in this staging by director Pamela Poletti, the Russian accent is unstoppable. Actor Chris Hart's gesticulating zeal as the quirky immigrant business owner from next door is the 21st century equivalent of Mr. Furley in this silly sitcom of a play that has glimmers of broader relevance. As Don Knotts became the best part about "Three's Company," so Hart becomes Letts' nutrition-free jelly in a doughnut that gets staler throughout the evening.

Letts opens the play with a robbery. Arthur, an aging hippie and the son of Polish immigrants, enters his vandalized doughnut shop. "The root of the Polish character is hopelessness," he informs us, and later: "Life is full of derailments."

Times are changing. A Starbucks across the street is taking his customers. The loud Russian guy, Max, wants to expand his DVD rental shop, hopefully by buying out Arthur. Business is lousy.

A nicely understated James Dale Green plays the burnt-out maker of "dessert cakes," arriving to work in a Grateful Dead shirt, ripped jeans and long ponytail.

He isn't quite prepared for a revolutionary soul to walk through his door.

Jonathan Underwood (as Franco) bursts into his lonely life like a brick through the window. The optimistic, fast-talking kid from the streets hopes to turn Arthur's gloomy old business model into a poetry-filled coffeehouse, where he might one day hold court as the writer of the Great American Novel.

The swirl of Franco's youthful optimism and Arthur's weary conservatism is "The Odd Couple"-ish fun part of the show. Green and Underwood make endearing counterparts.

But the arrival of the play's villain, played by Michael Mullins, forces both Arthur and Franco to make some unexpected changes and to reevaluate their lives in big ways.

Jo Lynne Palmer has a small but memorable part as Lady, an eccentric woman whose rough life has led to a clockwork daily appearance in the store.

Jamie Mann and the one-named actress Truth play a couple of beat cops who rely on Arthur for daily caffeine and conversation.

Though the humor in "Superior Donuts" is sometimes labored, Letts' script is inevitably sweet and filling, a mix of light characters stumbling into dark places and reemerging with new outlooks. It's a play about possibility. Sometimes life's "derailments" are merely a change of track.